Counterfactual encounters

If you had the pick of any figure from history, whom would you have round for dinner? It's a well-worn game, with typical answers usually incorporating Oscar Wilde, Napoleon, and attempts to explain why Plato and Jimi Hendrix would "have had the right chemistry".

But, if I may, I would like to propose a new variation to this essentially pointless but diverting parlour game. Having been reading Tom Stoppard's Travesties - a play based around the fact that in 1917 James Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara were all, for various reasons, in Zurich - I began to wonder about other unlikely encounters between writers and/or cultural figures. Instead of the dinner party format - where the potential for Napoleon biffing Oscar Wilde in the nose after receiving a particularly pithy put-down about his height would be too great - how about picking meetings between writers and historical luminaries that didn't happen, but could have?

In this slightly pretentious equivalent of an imaginary historical Heat magazine, there are countless possibilities. There have, for example, been several plays written about Oscar Wilde's travels around the Wild West during his American lecture tour in the early 1880s with an upsetting number sporting the crashingly predictable title The Wilde West - the best known being Charles Marowitz' 1988 farce. Sadly Billy the Kid had just been gunned down a year before he arrived on American soil and Jesse James got it just after Wilde arrived in the outlaw's hometown of Kansas in 1882. But if death had not got in the way, a meeting between the affected arch aesthete and the gun-toting hard man could have been an interesting affair.

This blog recently wondered whether Dickens was a greater writer than Tolstoy, and it would have been very interesting to see who would have come out on top in real-life encounter: would Leo have conceded there should be more jokes in his books? Would Charles have decided that his stories lacked moral gravitas, and opted to send Scrooge to a lonely and despairing end?

But maybe the most far-fetched instance of this in recent times - at least in terms of its wider historical implications - has been the speculation over the possible relationship between the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolf Hitler, the two actually having attended the same school in Vienna as teenagers. Kimberly Cornish's controversial book on the matter, The Jew of Linz (described in these precints by David Mackie as a load of "steaming old tosh") makes some rather questionable claims about their possible time together. Indeed, even though there is little evidence to confirm that the two actually met, Cornish argues that Hitler's childhood hatred of the Jewish Wittgenstein was responsible for shaping his later virulent anti-semitism and in some way provided the inspiration for the Holocaust.

Many other theoretical "meetings" and their implications spring to mind, but what would be your ideal possible made actual?